Wednesday's letters: Trudeau’s liberal hogwash

Wednesday

Oct 23, 2013 at 12:01 AM

I have read and enjoyed comic strips for the past 75 years (since I was 10 years old), and many strips have come and gone over those years. As I remember, most strips were comical as the name implied or sometimes shared a moral lesson. How in the world did “Doonesbury” become a comic strip?

I have read and enjoyed comic strips for the past 75 years (since I was 10 years old), and many strips have come and gone over those years. As I remember, most strips were comical as the name implied or sometimes shared a moral lesson. How in the world did “Doonesbury” become a comic strip?This strip is not only liberal hogwash but is often character assassination. In your Sunday comics for Oct. 6, “Doonesbury” creator Garry Trudeau referred to North Carolina moving “backwards,” citing several things that met with his liberal disapproval:(1) Banning pre-registration for young people. (2) Supporting private academies. (3) Slashing generous benefits to the unemployed. (4) Strict rules over abortion clinics. (5) Requiring minorities to have an ID to vote. (Why did he say minorities when the ID requirement includes everyone?) (6) Permitting guns in bars, parks and playgrounds. (7) Scientists will be punished if they use climate-change data in their projections — it’s the law. (I don’t know what this means.)The final blurb in the strip is “North Carolina — where progress is a dirty word.”If I were a resident of North Carolina, I think this strip would instigate a write-in campaign to eliminate “Doonesbury” from the local newspaper.Gene E. LoganUnion

Arguably, it might be interesting to observe our massive federal government being funded by cherry pickers who wanted to fund, say, Yellowstone but not Yosemite, Head Start but not the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, or the World War II Memorial but not the Food and Drug Administration or the Environmental Protection Agency, let alone the Affordable Care Act.The precedent would allow Congress to pick and choose so that Cabinet-level agencies would come and go on pure whim as foot-stomping congresspersons played to the tune of their highest bidder.Unfortunately, this is what has become of a country caught in a struggle between democracy and zealotry. Tea party lunacy has produced a squabbling paralysis in Congress where enormous egos have made governing structures almost rudderless, where respect for people’s jobs and the image of America internationally seem purely secondary to making some trivial point for the string-pullers back home. Sen. Ted Cruz, R-Texas — arrogant, sour, self-serving — rants about the “feddle gubmint,” all the while collecting a huge salary and accessing free government-funded health care.In 1962, John F. Kennedy remarked about the John Birch Society, a precursor of the tea party, saying its members “enjoy the comfort of opinion without the discomfort of thought.”The political theater we have all witnessed in Washington is a systemic amateurization of our hallowed political processes where quackery, belligerence and misplaced moralism hold sway.Robert PerrinInman